Why *Fringe'*s Finale Marks the Decline of Sci-Fi on Network TV

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Why *Fringe'*s Finale Marks the Decline of Sci-Fi on Network TV

When Fringe airs its series finale tonight (8 p.m. EST on Fox), it won't just mean a conclusion to the five-year run of stories about Olivia, Peter and Walter's Weird Science Adventures; it'll mark the end of an era for science fiction on broadcast television – for the foreseeable future, at least.

While the close of the series doesn't mean an end to openly genre shows on the Big Five networks (ABC, CBS, the CW, NBC and FOX), the ones that remain either skew more magical/supernatural (Once Upon a Time, Grimm, Supernatural) or pride themselves on a more grounded approach to the theoretically fantastic (Revolution, Arrow). But in terms of pure sci-fi TV, there isn't much left to carry the torch after *Fringe *closes up shop.

It wasn't always like this, of course; Some of the most well-known and well-loved modern science fiction has come from broadcast television throughout the decades, from The Twilight Zone through the various Star Treks, Babylon 5 to The X-Files and Lost. Indeed, when Fringe launched in 2008, it was just one in a raft of new shows from the genre that year alongside Dollhouse, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the remakes of Knight Rider and Eleventh Hour (Also running at the time, the aforementioned Lost and the second season of NBC's Chuck). In following years, science fiction fans were also treated to V, FlashForward, The Event and Terra Nova, as well, as networks tried to fill the gap left behind by the end of Lost in 2010.

Of course, most of those shows faded within a couple of years or less thanks to low ratings and – let's be honest – less-than-stellar creative choices (FlashForward and The Event, I'm looking at you). Ultimately, what appears to have killed off science fiction on mainstream broadcast television is the fact that mainstream broadcast viewers don't really want to watch it anymore. Or at least, not as much as they want to watch reality shows, procedurals where a man with black hair and a blonde woman fight crime, or sassy sitcoms, all of which are cheaper for the networks to produce and don't involve nearly as much explanation to viewers tuning in for the first time.

The unfriendly atmosphere towards the genre makes something like Fringe all the more rare, and all the more important, in its strange way. It's a show that lasted longer than most believed it could – Fox has, after all, cancelled cheaper shows with higher ratings in the past – and was proudly, almost stubbornly, obscure and given to wonderfully insane plot twists to throw its soap operatic elements in new directions when the viewers least expected it. Few shows, for example, have managed to keep a Will-They-Won't-They relationship dynamic going by rebooting the timeline or swapping one of the characters for her own parallel world doppelganger, much to my eternal sadness. That has to be something worth appreciating.

Over its five year run, Fringe offered both the best and worst of science fiction television. It was far from perfect by any means, with sudden changes in direction or plot twists that happened so quickly you could get whiplash and a tendency to purposefully overlook obvious plot holes or make dramatic leaps of logic if there was the possibility for a moment of cheap emotional tension to be mined. What it remained, however, was a show worth all of the disappointments and frustrations it doled out on a regular basis.

Consistently entertaining even in its worst moments, the series was a collection of alternately hilarious and fiendishly inventive stories that balanced easily-identifiable and sympathetic personal drama – a son trying to rebuild his relationship with his absent father, a woman struggling to balance her professional and personal lives – with increasingly spectacular and surreal high stakes that scaled up from an endangered airplane full of passengers to the very survival of the human race.

Although it launched as something akin to a contemporary X-Files – an admitted influence in the show's creation, alongside the movies of David Cronenberg and The Twilight Zone – Fringe quickly developed its own identity thanks in large part to the presence of Walter Bishop, a character who managed to be both heartbreakingly tragic and endlessly comedic within the same moment, played pitch perfectly by one-time Australian soap opera star John Noble. With his combination of manic energy and deep melancholy, Walter brought a humanity to the show that gave its Weird Science Of The Week formula a heart, and gave viewers who could have been turned off by cross-dimensional shape-shifting assassins and time-traveling environmental terrorists a reason to keep tuning in.

Behold what is essentially a 90-second love letter to Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations, which not only made it into a recent episode in the first place, but was one of the most important scenes in the episode in question. This is how weird and wonderful Fringe – and science fiction television as a whole – could be at its best. Despite its frustrating moments, Fringe will be missed after tonight, particularly in the absence of a network sci-fi show ready to thrill, amaze and amuse its viewers even half as much. See you in the next life, Gene.